Victor Dorneanu has an interesting post on Cybernetic Productivity and Emacs. Like Dorneanu, I was unfamiliar with the term but it has, apparently, been around since the early 2000s. It’s a strategy for dealing with your workload in the digital age. The TL;DR is summed up by its four principals:
- Automate and Speedup shallow tasks.
- Keep the information you need at your fingertips.
- Remove friction from communication.
- Simplify the extraction of actionable information from raw data
Dorneanu notes that he learned all this from Cal Newport, whose work he follows fairly closely. Newport, though, says the cybernetic productivity approach doesn’t work because, if I understand his argument, we’re too overwhelmed with work to have time to follow the principals.
Dorneanu disagrees and offers his use of Emacs as a counterargument. His post details how he used the four principals—except, maybe, the communication part—to write and publish his current post. The important part is that he did it all within the unified environment of Emacs. He lets Emacs handle the routine parts of publishing a post and uses Elfeed to easily retrieve the necessary required information.
Finally, he notes that the recent integration of Emacs with the various AI/ML services provides a very nice and efficient way of sifting through data looking for the wheat among the chaff. I’d judge that more promise than fact right now but I do take his point.